2018-03-20

Framework for Social Credit System Already Exists in USA

A lot of people rightly fear China's social credit system, not because they care what happens in China, but because creating a similar system anywhere in the world is relatively easy. The only places where it wouldn't work is places where physical cash and anonymous transactions still dominate the economy. It is hard to imagine how a system like China's won't come to the West though, unless there is a determined public effort to ban it or a strong enough private force to get around it.

Even though there's no system yet in the West, there's already the framework for it in place. In the wake of the Charlottesville protests last summer, many technology companies shut off right-wing websites including PayPal and domain registration companies. Some of those cut off were involved in the protests or had direct ties, others were vaguely connected and some had nothing to do with them at all.

A few days ago, Dr Jennifer Roback Morse, a frequent contributor to MercatorNet, learned that credit card donations to her organisation, the Ruth Institute, had been cut off. Vanco Payment Solutions – “unlock the power of generosity” -- sent her a curt note saying that it was a hate group.

The “hate group” label had been pasted on the Ruth Institute by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), probably because it has opposed same-sex marriage. But the job of the Ruth Institute is healing the effects of family breakdown, not denigrating homosexuals. This appears to be another sign of LGBT corporate tyranny: if you don’t agree with us, get lost.

There's no practical difference between China's "once untrustworthy, always restricted" system run by the government, and a U.S. version of "once right-wing, always restricted" run by private companies in conjunction with political groups like the SPLC. (In some ways the private system is more insidious in the West because many people think, "It's a private company, they can do what they want." If the Trump or Obama administration announced a social credit system, it would be soundly rejected by a vast majority of Americans.) The main difference in the United States is that people can build alternative companies and systems. The rise of cryptocurrencies accelerated in the wake of PayPal's moves because it became clear that even payment companies could become political weapons.

More broadly, political fracturing and "secession" are already happening in America, but it's taking place first in the economic sphere. As social mood trends negative there will be increased conflict, not less. Even though it won't be by the hand of government (yet), there will be increasing levels of censorship and authoritarian controls placed on users by private companies. This will come in two forms. One will be a "fair" censorship system that targets behavior. It might stray into some actual censorship or merely try to deal with bad behavior caused by rising negative mood. Amazon is actually a good example of the latter with their targeting of fake book reviews. The other will be "unfair" censorship that relies on political advocacy group definitions of "hate speech" or internal systems mostly likely dominated by left-of-center people in Silicon Valley. Authoritarians drift into whatever system allows them social control. Now that systems targeting user behavior exist, any company without strict policies on how they are used will eventually be subverted by political ideologies with penchant for thought control.